The German Invasion of Norway: April 1940
Geirr H. Haarr. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009. 416 pp. Maps. Illus. Index. Notes. Bib. $49.95
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Douglas J. MacIntyre, U.S. Marine Corps
Norway, a heavily forested and mountainous country with more than 2,000 miles of coastline and intercoastal waterways, was the unlikely setting for one of World War II's critical opening campaigns. Sandwiched between Germany's invasion of Poland and the May 1940 invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands and France, Germany's Operation Weser
bung and the unsuccessful Allied counter-invasion in Norway represent many of World War II's "firsts." These include the first large-scale joint operations for Germany and the Allies, the first carrier task force and amphibious operations, and the first time in history that airpower decisively neutralized a naval power's command of the seas. Students of the operational art often conclude that German execution of the operational tenets of synergy, simultaneity and depth, anticipation, and timing and tempo represent the critical factors of their success. Likewise, historians and politicians have dissected Allied political decision-making and international apathy toward Norway's neutrality during the period as precursors to failure.Geirr H. Haarr's new work effectively addresses these areas and details the naval actions of April 1940; however, it is his effort to provide Norwegian perspectives that adds a dimension missing from countless English-language volumes on the campaign.
Using extensive first-person accounts, interviews, and historical research, Haarr provides a holistic picture of the events leading up to April 1940. He depicts Norway as a country clinging to its neutrality and unprepared for the German forces arrayed against it, unable to work with an Allied expedition sent to help. Following the events in Poland and Finland, Norway's sovereignty and neutrality were increasingly under pressure because of its psychological dependence on England's naval command of the seas to protect it from invasion. The harsh reality was that the Allies, specifically England, had a greater interest in violating their neutrality than the Germans. Despite protests by King Haakon VII of Norway, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and the Allied Supreme War Council continued planning for preemptive Allied landings in Norway, commenced mining Norway's intercoastal transit areas, and worked to instigate an incident of German violation of Norway's neutrality.
Meanwhile, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, chief of the German Navy (OKM), finalized planning for Operation Weser
bung, the rapid deployment of forces over the length of Norway via fast naval ships and Luftwaffe transports to forestall Allied intervention in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea, provide security for sources and transit of raw materials, and secure naval and air bases for future attacks on the British Isles. Offering opinions of Norway's leaders at the time, Haarr develops our understanding of how they reacted to Allied and German diplomatic actions prior to the invasion and once German warships commenced their assaults.Haarr details the naval actions throughout Norway's fjords and intercoastal waterways and German landings at Oslo, Kristiansand, Arandel, Egersund, Bergen, Trondhiem, and Narvik. Facing a German war machine that few understood at the time and the moral dilemma of neutrality, Norway's defensive capability was much constrained. Haarr illustrates how military and civil leaders attempted to address the friction and fog of war they were encountering. Often acting without orders, Norway's leaders were forced to quickly determine German intentions, organize defense and civil response, or arrange local surrender.
While answering why the Germans came to Norway in April 1940 and how Operation Weser
bung succeeded, this book concurrently explores the dilemmas Norway faced as it reacted to German aggression. It is the definitive companion piece to T. K. Derry's authoritative official history, The Campaign in Norway (London: HSMO Books, 1952).The Good Soldiers
David Finkel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009. 304 pp. Illus. Source Notes. Appen. $26.
Reviewed by David Wood
A reporter for the Washington Post, David Finkel went to war in Iraq in early 2007 with an infantry company and came back to write a powerful book, one with no sweeping strategic overview, no interviews with generals and strategists, no analysis, no judgments, and no politics.
Instead, The Good Soldiers tells the story of Sergeant Michael Emory, shot in the back of the head in the al-Kamaliyah district of Baghdad. A medic stuffed gauze into the back of Emory's head to stanch massive bleeding, and a Soldier named Adam Schumann picked him up and slung him over his back in a fireman's carry while the blood trickled out of Emory's head and into Schumann's mouth. He got Emory into a Humvee to be evacuated, and when Emory asked, "Why does my head hurt?" Schumann assured him, "You're gonna be okay." But Schumann never could get that iron taste of Emory's blood out of his mouth, no matter how many times he rinsed it with Kool-Aid.
Finkel describes the war fought hourly and daily by American kids who go to battle straight from American cities and heartlands, bypassing the halls of power in Washington, D.C. where strategy and policy are shaped and debated. This is the war that is largely missing from that debate, an unblinking, unapologetic portrait of the inglorious and heroic blue-collar work of close combat.
The Good Soldiers is a fast-paced and gripping tale. A masterly storyteller, Finkel works from the Soldier's point of view, interweaving detail and insight. The reader comes away with searing images and a new appreciation of the cost of those words thrown around so casually in Washington: "heroes" and "sacrifice." There is more in this book, for the policymaker and citizen alike, than in a year's worth of think-tank output.
Here is Nate Showman, toward the end of the battalion's 15-month deployment as part of the 2007 surge, who chose to direct his gun-truck patrol on one route rather than another, figuring the insurgents wouldn't expect them to go that way. Finkel writes,
"
All right,' replied [Patrick] Hanley, the truck commander in the lead vehicle, who was about to give his entire left arm to the cause of freedom, as well as part of the left temporal lobe of his brain, which would leave him unconscious and nearly dead for five weeks, and with long-term memory loss, and dizziness so severe that for the next eight months he would throw up whenever he moved his head, and weight loss that would take him from 203 pounds down to 128."The IED blast that got Hanley also killed two and wounded two more of Showman's Soldiers.
Hours later, when Showman got back to battalion, his boots were bloody and he carried "a sadness so thorough that he'd been unable to speak." It wasn't until the end of the day that Showman could meet with his battalion commander, telling him that when the IED detonated, "it took Little Miller's head right off. It went right through Bennett. That night Showman wrote to his new wife:
I'm gonna need some help when I get home.'"At their Ranger Ball at Fort Riley months later, many of the Soldiers came to celebrate, including the wounded Sergeant Emory who,
"upon hearing his name called, would gather every bit of strength he had gained since being shot in Kamaliyah in order to push himself out of his wheelchair and up onto his feet.
"Trembling, up he would go. His posture would be lopsided. His left arm would be quivering. His head would still be misshapen. His speech would still be slurred. His memory would still be hazy. His thoughts would still be the thoughts of a man who had once decided to bring his wrists to his teeth and bite. But for one minute he would stand on his own and try not to lose his balance as the rest of the soldiers, one after another, rose to their feet, too."
Deciphering the Rising Sun: Navy and Marine Corps Codebreakers, Translators, and Interpreters in the Pacific War
Roger Dingman. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009. 272 pp. Notes. Illus. $29.95
Reviewed by Captain Emil H. Levine, U.S. Navy Reserve (Retired)
In this volume Roger Dingman describes the development of the "crash" program for training Navy and Marine Corps Japanese linguists immediately before and during World War II and their impact on postwar U.S.-Japanese relations. His background as a former naval officer stationed in Japan, a student of Japanese, and a military historian from the University of Southern California history department especially qualifies him for this research.
Dingman provides more than 50 pages of footnotes, mostly from primary sources, which contain interviews with and correspondence from these Navy and Marine Corps linguists, their families, professors, diplomats, and military personnel.
The Pacific theater was extremely fortunate that in the summer of 1940, Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, then with the Office of Naval Intelligence, and one of the few Navy linguists trained in Japan, hired other civilian linguists, notably Albert E. Hindmarsh of Harvard and Florence Walne of Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley to assist in developing the training program.
Dingman describes how schools were established at Harvard and Berkeley in October 1941, but academic bickering (for example, over which text to use) and poor academic performance at Harvard caused a move to Berkeley in 1942. As a result of the requirement to evacuate Japanese Americans from the West Coast, including many school instructors, the Navy Japanese Language School was established at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which was in the same naval district. This was one of 14 schools established during World War II for Japanese language training.
The rigors of long classes, exhausting homework, and the resulting bond between students and their Japanese-American instructors led to a cross-cultural understanding that played a critical role in the war, well beyond linguistics.
Graduates were generally ordered to Washington, DC, Pearl Harbor, and Australia. Personnel assigned to Washington worked at the well-documented OP-20-GY (cryptanalytical section), OP-20-GZ, translating documents, or as crypto-linguists breaking and translating Japanese messages.
Dingman writes how linguists at the Naval Intelligence Center Pacific Ocean Area initially translated captured documents. Notably, translation of a Japanese Tinian hydrographic chart is credited with a change in invasion plans, which saved lives. A small number of linguists went to sea as Radio Intelligence Unit (RIU) officers, conducting real-time intercept and translation. This highly classified program was so successful that RIUs were assigned to every carrier division.
As the Pacific campaign developed, linguists deployed with invading forces. Unfortunately, their initial usefulness was minimal, as few Japanese prisoners were taken (for example, 28 out of 2,000 defenders at Attu). Inter-service rivalry was another factor, as the Army felt their translators were superior. But conditions improved as the war progressed.
As more prisoners and civilians became available for interrogation, the role of the linguists began to transition to cultural and civil action specialists. This contact hastened the transformation, as the linguists began to recognize the human side of the enemy.
The early postwar role of these personnel in Japan as linguists and cultural specialists undoubtedly contributed to a peaceful occupation. Dingman documents the subsequent careers of many as successful diplomats, businessmen, intelligence specialists, journalists, artists, and academics influenced by attending the Navy Japanese Language School.
In his epilogue Dingman compares Iraq and Japan, writing that policy makers "lacked knowledge of Iraq's history and culture and language" and "America's failures with Iraq make its successes in war with Japan stand out clearly."
The United States Coast Guard in World War II: A History of Domestic and Overseas Actions
Thomas P. Ostrom. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009. 260 pp. Intro. Notes. Bib. Index. $39.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Jim Dolbow, U.S. Coast Guard Reserve
World War II and Coast Guard history buffs alike will be pleased with Thomas Ostrom's latest book, The United States Coast Guard in World War II: A History of Domestic and Overseas Actions. Long overdue, this book not only remedies the Coast Guard's ill-deserved nickname of being the "forgotten Service," but it serves as a great reminder that the Coast Guard's post 9-11 homeland security missions can trace their roots back to World War II.
Ostrom is a history professor and served in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve from 1961 to 1969. His previous books include The U.S. Coast Guard: 1790
Present and The USCG on the Great Lakes.On 1 November 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8929, transferring the Coast Guard from the U.S. Treasury Department to the Navy Department, where it would remain until 1 January 1946. It was during these 50 months that the Coast Guard, as Ostrom portrays it, saw combat action in every theater including the homefront with a force that numbered, at war's end in 1945, some 1,677 vessels (including 600 cutters) and 171,192 personnel.
The book begins with an outline of the Coast Guard's roles and missions and its history of combat action since its founding on 4 August 1790 by Alexander Hamilton. After this helpful primer, the book is divided into the various war theaters and broken into chapters on organization, time-tested missions, and a succinct biography of the Coast Guard's wartime Commandant, Admiral Russell Waesche, the first Coast Guard officer ever to be promoted to four-star rank.
The book's chapter on port security, navigation, and aviation is history with a purpose for today's Coast Guardsmen.
Some of the most interesting prose in the book was obviously gleaned from oral history interviews or correspondence conducted with Coast Guard veterans like the late SN2 Seymour L. Wittek. Ostrom deserves praise for weaving all these sources into a powerful war story that will be worth telling for generations. He finishes with a detailed World War II chronology, a compilation of documents, and a collection of photos from the U.S. Coast Guard Historian's Office.
After the war, Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal stated, "During the arduous war years, the Coast Guard has earned the highest respect and deepest appreciation of the Navy and Marine Corps. Its performance of duty has been without exception in keeping with the highest traditions of the naval service." The United States Coast Guard in World War II documents this performance of duty, and I can't recommend this book highly enough.